The musical instrument tower

The tower is a working storeroom, not a display. Behind the glass, temperature, humidity and light are controlled, and the roughly ten thousand instruments inside, nearly four thousand from Africa, more than two and a half thousand from Asia, some two and a half thousand from the Americas including nine hundred pre-Columbian pieces, and the rest from Oceania and island Southeast Asia, are arranged by type and region for the curators who fetch them for study or exhibition. What the visitor gets is the chance to see the scale of a collection that would otherwise be invisible. Listening stations on the ramp and the plateau let you hear recordings of some of the instruments, and at certain moments the resonances of instruments inside the tower itself.

The instruments came largely from the Musée de l'Homme, whose ethnomusicology department collected and recorded across the world for most of the twentieth century. Many were gathered by the expeditions that also brought back the sculptures upstairs, so the tower is a reminder that these cultures were heard as well as seen. It is one of the first things you encounter in the museum and one of the last, since the exit routes pass it again, and it sets the tone: a collection presented as a dense, mysterious mass rather than a set of labelled masterpieces.

Did You Know? The tower is a climate-controlled storeroom you can look into, holding about ten thousand instruments that no ordinary gallery could show.